SEAMS 2019
Sat 25 - Sun 26 May 2019 Montreal, QC, Canada
co-located with ICSE 2019
Sun 26 May 2019 11:25 - 11:50 at Duluth - Security Chair(s): David Garlan

N-variant systems protect software from attack by executing multiple variants of a single program in parallel, checking regularly that they are behaving consistently. The variants are designed to behave identically during normal operation and differently during an attack. When different behavior (divergence) is detected, N-variant systems self-heal by either rolling back to a safe state or restarting. Unfortunately, an attacker can create a denial-of-service (DoS) attack from a diverging input by using it to force an N-variant system into an endless diverge/restart cycle.

This paper describes a defense, CRISPR-Inspired Program Resiliency (Crispy), that automatically protects N-variant systems from such DoS attacks. Crispy mitigates DoS attacks against N-variant systems using an automatic signature generation technique modeled on CRISPR/Cas, the bacterial adaptive immune system. Experiments on two webservers using exploits developed by an independent Red Team showed Crispy protected against 87.5% of DoS attacks with zero false positives. Overhead was minimal and varied according to the number of signatures maintained, which can be tailored to the threat model and performance requirements.

Sun 26 May

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11:00 - 12:30
SecuritySEAMS 2019 at Duluth
Chair(s): David Garlan Carnegie Mellon University
11:00
25m
Talk
Towards Secure Architectural AdaptationLong Paper
SEAMS 2019
Narges Khakpour Linnaeus University, Charilaos Skandylas Linnaeus University, Goran Saman Nariman University of Human Development , Danny Weyns Linnaeus University, Sweden
11:25
25m
Talk
Defeating Denial-of-Service Attacks in a Self-Managing N-Variant SystemBest Paper AwardLong Paper
SEAMS 2019
Jessica Jones Arizona State University, Jason Hiser University of Virginia, Jack Davidson University of Virginia, Stephanie Forrest Arizona State University
11:50
20m
Talk
Blockchain Networks as Adaptive SystemsNIER
SEAMS 2019
Sotirios Liaskos York University, Bo Wang York University, Nahid Alimohammadi York University
12:10
20m
Talk
Towards the Detection of Partial Feature InteractionsNIER
SEAMS 2019
Byron Devries Grand Valley State University, Betty H.C. Cheng Michigan State University